Institutional memory
Institutional memory keeps how your organization does things and what it has learned, so the work does not depend on one person. It holds:
- Procedures: written, versioned steps for recurring work, which any member can run.
- Lessons: what an initiative taught you, and what to do next time.
- Templates: reusable starting points for initiatives, documents and recurring meetings.
- Linked knowledge: records and web pages attached to any of the above.
It is its own part of the app: Library in the Initiatives sub-navigation, when your plan includes it.
The library
Library lists procedures, lessons and templates. Search the library looks through all three at once (titles, purposes, steps, lessons, recommendations and tags), and Show narrows the list to one kind. Library items also appear in the app's main search.
Two figures at the top show how well the organization's practice is written down:
- Procedures documented: the share of procedures (not counting retired ones) that are fully documented. See Procedures.
- Runs by someone other than the owner, 90 days: how often a procedure was followed by a member other than the person who owns it. If this stays at zero, the work still depends on its owner.
Researchers, editors and project leads (and owners) see New procedure, New lesson and New template.
Lessons
A lesson has a title, the lesson itself, a recommendation for next time and tags. It usually comes from an initiative's outcome.
- When an outcome is recorded on an initiative, the outcome shows Turn this into a lesson, a template, a procedure, and the initiative's owner gets a reminder, depending on their notification settings.
- Waiting for a lesson at the top of the library lists outcomes nobody has drawn a lesson from yet. Choose Record the lesson.
- A lesson keeps a frozen reference to the outcome it came from, so later edits to the initiative do not change what it rests on.
- A lesson from a restricted initiative is visible only to people who can see that initiative.
- Any member can record a lesson. Its recorder, or a lead of its initiative, can edit or archive it.
Templates
A template is one of three kinds:
- Initiative: a mission, success measures, milestones (each due a number of days after the start) and tasks.
- Artifact (a document outline): the sections of a recurring document, each with a heading and guidance, such as a candidate statement.
- Ritual (a recurring meeting): a cadence and an agenda.
To save an initiative as a template, choose a template in the prompt under one of its outcomes; the form opens with that initiative's plan. New template on its own writes an artifact or ritual template. A restricted initiative cannot be saved as a template, so its plan does not leak through one.
On an initiative template, choose Start an initiative from it. The new-initiative form opens prefilled with the mission and measures; once you save it, the template's milestones and tasks are added.
Editing a template saves a new version with a note on What changed. Earlier versions stay readable.
Linked knowledge
Each procedure, lesson and template has a Linked knowledge section. Authors can attach a web page (with a title) or a record in the app. Links are for finding things, not evidence: the evidence a lesson rests on is kept separately and cannot be removed.